Hullo.

Tonight was orchestra in Erie, which of course made me forget about returning my stupid B&B book to the high school. I erased everything in it (as I may have mentioned) but I forgot to take it with me today because I was too bust looking forward to getting abused by Maestro this evening. We’ll see if I remember it tomorrow. Hopefully I will.

I totally put my schedule on Google Calendar. With only a few weeks to go. ‘Cause, you know, it’s useful.

But my finals schedule is there too, as well as the performance I’m gonna have to do at commencement. We’ll see if I actually remember to continue to update it. (Hint: probably not)

Edit: I changed the location of the calendar too, so that I could use the layout that I actually like. It might be too annoying though. We’ll see.

So much for updating every day, huh?

Sorry.

No really, it is.

Okay, so it’s not. You got me.

In my defense, it’s only 2:42AM on Tuesday so really the day hasn’t been going on long enough for me to embrace it yet. You could say I’m a “late adopter” of the day changing. Or something.

It’s late. Leave me alone.

I’ve been playing a lot of Guitar Hero 3 lately. The song “Impulse” is really quite a lot of fun. I enjoy it heartily. Also, “Cliffs of Dover,” though it is slightly harder.

I was going to write stuff here. I wonder what it was.

Oh, yeah. New York. Going to New York on Wednesday morning (gotta wake myself up at 6:30 to get to Swope at 6:45, fun fun). Actually, we’re playing at a couple of high schools “on the way” to New York, and then just screwing around in New York for two days. I put “on the way” in quotes because by “on the way” I actually mean “in the opposite direction of New York.”

But oh well.

If I manage to find my camera, I’ll bring it along and take pictures and then post them here. If I don’t find my camera then I won’t and I won’t.

This has been a pretty scatterbrained entry.

I think that’s my cue to go to bed.

Bye.

I haven’t written in a while etc. etc. etc.

With that out of the way, I’m going to make a couple of observations based on yesterday’s rehearsal. See, yesterday was the first day of rehearsal for the Steel Valley High School’s musical, “My Favorite Year.” For those of you who haven’t read the rest of this blog (i.e. everyone), I played lead trumpet for Penn Hills when they did it last year. The guy playing second trumpet was Brad, who is the band director for Steel Valley. He said he’d call me to play his musical this year, and he did. I didn’t know it was going to be “My Favorite Year,” though. That just makes it easier on me as I don’t have to practice nearly as much.

A few weeks ago, I acquired a mouthpiece from Dr. Hawk (which reminds me, I need to bring my checkbook and pay him for it). It’s around the same rim size as my Bach, except it’s a little shallower and the rim is less sharp. Plus the bore is a little bigger. Of course none of that makes sense to anyone who doesn’t play trumpet. Oh well.

In any case, the combination of the large bore plus the shallower cup made me sound amazing. I mean, I hate to “toot my own horn,” so to speak, but I was absolutely shocked when I heard myself play. My sound was my regular sound until about G right above the treble staff, and then after that it starts to cut. Hard. My sound became not unlike a knife. A ridiculously loud knife.

I say this because I’m not sure if I like it or not. On one hand, it sounds amazing and my high range has opened up really well. On the other hand, it’s about as far from a classical tone as you can get, and even though I have my Bach mouthpiece, I’m afraid I’ll lose the tone that I really like for playing classical / more legit stuff.

We’ll see, I guess. At the moment everyone seems to be happy with it. In fact, a bunch of kids came up to me at lunchtime and told me how great it sounds, which is nice.

I really wish I could play more musicals. I love it. I hope I can continue playing them when I’m out of college.

So, on another note (ha, ha)…

I think I need to write in this blog more often. To be honest it’s getting kind-of annoying to see these entries dated months apart. I think I’m going to try to write in this every day unless I’m actually unable (which I might be later this week when the jazz band goes to New York. More on that later).

So that’s all I’m going to write for now. I’ll update tomorrow hopefully.

Man, I really need to write in here more often. I just have nothing of any real consequence to write.

So I got my programming project back in Algorithms and Data Structures, and it turns out I got an 18/15. Most excellent. The assignment was to implement Shell Sort, Heap Sort, and Radix Sort. I think all of them are pretty nifty but honestly I think Heap Sort is brilliant. If I ever need to sort something I’ll probably end up using Heap Sort. It’s just such an elegant solution that is ridiculously fast.

So our next assignment has to do with linked lists: we’re supposed to take a singly-linked list class implemented in Java and add a “tail” pointer alongside the “head” pointer so that actions like adding and removing from the end of a list would be made easier. It’ll take maybe five minutes of actual programming, but the hoops he makes us jump through for documentation are pretty intense. Plus he makes us use JBuilder 2006 Enterprise, which of course I don’t have, so I have to go to the AI lab to do my project and whine whine bitch moan

So with that all out of the way, I have nothing else to say. Oh, my car sucks.

Well, it’s been a while. Looking over the past few entries it seems like I should wait another day to keep my pattern of monthly updates on the 12th going.

Bah.

Well, anyway, there hasn’t been much to write about in the first place. Finished all my stupid exams, managed to somehow get B’s in both Theory of Computation and Programming Languages (two classes in which I believe everyone in the class had failing grades). This leads me to my goal of taking as many classes with that professor as I can possibly manage, since he seems to pass everyone regardless of their performance.

But I don’t feel like talking about school right now, so I won’t.

I have been studying Japanese really hard recently. I got an account over on lang-8.com (which is, by the way, a great site), so that’s been helping me out a lot.

I think I need a new username. I’m kinda getting tired of using “The Letter A” for everything. Especially because it’s common enough that it’s usually taken, forcing me to settle for stuff like TheLtrA or whatever.

Maybe I should just make up a word or something, or use something ridiculously unpronounceable like Xyybftrlb–()^}}{{^()–blrtfbyyX. It’s a palindrome, so it gets extra points. I think that’ll be my new username from now on.

No but uh honestly. I need a new username. I can’t think of anything, and using something from Japanese would be lame. Using something from Dutch would be absolutely hilarious though, because everything that comes out of that language is instantly comedy gold. Bijvoorbeeld, for example. Hah, see that? I made a play on words.

I need sleep.

Ashram
1. a secluded building, often the residence of a guru, used for religious retreat or instruction in Hinduism.
2. a malapropism describing my performance on the recent theory of computation final.

“If you know a song on a piano, and you try to play that same thing on a violin, it will not sound… right! You need to know that special… um… thing about that instrument.”

– My programming languages professor

This November has been absolutely crazy. Last week I had four days in a row where I had no time to write because of gigs, and this weekend is shaping up to be pretty similar. For those reasons I decided to stop the NaNoWriMo adventure for this month. If it had happened last month things would be different but this month has been so crazy for me and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get less crazy in the future, what with two concerts and their respective dress rehearsals, my 21st birthday (finally), and who knows what music-wise.

Oh well.

I’m in programming languages right now. Got my laptop (though I’m typing this on the actual computer because it’s less conspicuous), but generally I look at the front of the room where the professor and the powerpoint is and type without looking at the monitor. I have my laptop today because I have it dual-booting windows and Ubuntu. Linux makes it a million times easier to follow along with the programming examples in class, because it’s way more programmer-friendly. Especially with interpreted command-line based languages such as Scheme (which we just finished) and Python (which apparently we’re going to be starting at some point soon.

Also, writing Scheme functions on one line is pretty hilarious. I mean, it doesn’t really matter for programs like the one that finds the volume of a sphere given the radius:

(define (vol rad) (* (/ 4 3) (* 3.14 (* r (* r r)))))

But for a program that finds the roots of a quadratic equation given the coefficients:

(define (a b c) (cond ((< (- (* b b) (* 4 a c)) 0) “The roots are complex.”) (else (let ((root_part_over_2a (/ (sqrt (- (* b b) (* 4 a c))) (* 2 a))) (minus_b_over_2a (/ (- 0 b) (* 2 a)))) (list (+ minus_b_over_2a root_part_over_2a) (- minus_b_over_2a root_part_over_2a))))))

It just looks arcane and stupid. Also, since we’ve been learning this stupid language, I’ve been having recurring nightmares that parentheses are chasing me down and trying to stab me.

I want to take Operating Systems. I find that stuff extremely interesting, and I’d really like to understand how an operating system even works.

Pimsleur Japanese is really weird. I mean, it’s great to work on pronunciation because it’s all native speakers who say the example phrases, but the Japanese they teach is super-stiff. It’s still important to learn, sure, but geez. I’d give an example if I could type in Japanese, but obviously the IME is not installed on the computer lab computers.

I wish I didn’t have brass choir today. Friday brass choir is always the worst because it’s my last class of the week and I just want to get out and go do what I want to do. Of course that doesn’t apply today since I have to drive all the way down to Carnegie tonight to play Fiddler, but still.

Oh, I didn’t mention that here, did I? Maybe a little. Last Friday at 5:00PM, I got called by someone who went to SRU last year who was sick and needed me to go play Fiddler for him at 7:00 that evening. Well, I also filled in the following night, and it looks like I’m going to be doing the same thing tonight as well. My money’s on tomorrow night too. This production goes on for three weeks, so I may get called to do it next Friday and Saturday as well. Hopefully I’ll get paid something fierce for coming in at the last second like that, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Still, if it’s above $100, I’ll come out ahead of what I paid for gas driving all the way down there twice each weekend.

Well, it’s about time to hit the old dusty trail. Brass choir time. Hopefully I’ll be able to leave early if they play the one I don’t play on last, but I doubt it. Generally they play that one first for some reason. Maybe it’s because of me.